Financial Wake-Up Call 3-1-2007

Money Changes Everything: In a study about delayed gratification and risk, psychologists have found that people are more willing to wait to collect a money reward than they are for any of three consumable rewards — beer, candy and soda.

For instance, if the average person were given the choice between an amount of soda right away and $50 worth of soda that they would have to wait six months to get, most people would take significantly less than $50 worth of soda now (discounting the value of the delayed soda considerably).

In contrast, the person given a choice between an amount of money right now and $50 in six months would not discount the delayed money nearly as much as the soda.

IRS To Go After eBay Sellers?: It seems that more tax experts are calling for eBay and other online auctions to hand over information on the sales of sellers to collect taxes:

Now a growing chorus of tax experts is hoping to crack down on the cheating by requiring eBay — and other online auctions, such as those on Yahoo, Ubid.com and Amazon — to track users and report their gross sales to the federal government. Armed with such information, the IRS could better seek any taxes owed, potentially reaping millions of dollars in extra revenue for the U.S. Treasury.

Passport Deals: There was recently a change making it mandatory to have a passport to travel to certain countries where previously US citizen’s didn’t need one. To help people, some countries are offering incentives to counter the cost of getting passports if people make that country their first destination with the new passport:

Getting passports for everybody can add a lot to the cost of a family vacation. At $95 for adults and $82 for children under the age of 16, a family of four will spend an extra $354. Because of that, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are now marketing themselves as “no passport destinations.” And hotels in the Caribbean are fighting back with a number of money saving offers.